William of Norwich, a young English apprentice, was found dead in 1144, the victim of mysterious circumstances. A few years later, a monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote an account of William’s “martyrdom” at the hands of a group of Jews who allegedly tortured and murdered him in a ritual reenactment of the death of Jesus, in accordance with what Thomas alleged was Jewish custom. From this point on, the accusation that Jews engage in the ritual murder of Christian (or Muslim) children has refused to die, despite the utter absence of evidence. Jonathan Brent reviews The Murder of William of Norwich, a recent book on the subject by E. M. Rose:

[The accusation of] ritual murder, though repudiated by officials of both the Christian and Muslim faiths over many centuries, remains a potent tool of public incitement—its persistence is amply attested to today in the ugly anti-Semitic provocations throughout the Muslim world. Christianity has not become immune, either. In the early 1990s, for instance, the Russian Orthodox Church seriously investigated the possibility that the execution of the Tsar and the royal family in 1918 was a “ritual murder.”

The cause [for the accusation of murder, according to Rose], was to be found . . . in the social, economic, and political upheavals brought about by civil war and the failed Second Crusade—the crushing debt incurred by the knights errant and the humiliations of the crown heads of Europe for their disgraceful defeat. During this period, William of Norwich’s death was promoted, Rose writes, “in the manner of any successful capital campaign” by the intellectual leaders of the time. Once political, social, and economic interests fused with religious sentiment, the blood-libel accusation became a warrant for genocide.

The search for spiritual purity—whether of Catholic souls or of the Nazi Volk—was the pretext for murder, extortion, rape, and humiliation of the Jews, and was always associated with the liquidation of debts, the seizure of Jewish property, the perceived economic gains of local Christian society, and the power of rulers, whether clerical or secular. In short, plunder. Impoverished knights could absolve themselves of debt to Jewish moneylenders; kings and counts could lay claim to vast new riches for their treasuries; peasants and townspeople could take the Jews’ businesses and possessions; and the Church could command the attention of the people and their sovereigns alike.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.